Pantheon is the default desktop environment originally created for the elementary OS distribution. It is written from scratch using Vala and the GTK3 toolkit. With regards to usability and appearance, the desktop has some similarities with GNOME Shell and Mac OS X.

Contents

Installation

Pantheon is split into several packages which are available in the AUR. To get a minimal desktop interface, you may start by installing pantheon-session-bzrAUR. This will pull the following core components:

Additional Infos

Github repository

You will need to build at least 'bamf' from there because the AUR package is out of date. Some other packages which do not belong to me can be found in the AUR, you should build those packages from the GitHub repo if available as they are packaged differently.

Stable releases

Several of the listed packages have seen stable releases, it is recommended to use them when available, they are available on the GitHub repository and in the AUR.

Launching Pantheon

Via a Display Manager

Note: Currently, pantheon-session-bzrAUR uses a custom gnome-session with desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart. This method will not work with the current version of GNOME (this is the same for the GNOME/Openbox session too).

Via .xinitrc

You can also use ~/.xinitrc with slim to launch the Pantheon shell. The following code will successfully launch a Pantheon session:

You may add any other program you'd like to start with Pantheon as well.

Configuration

Configuring Pantheon is done via switchboard-bzrAUR and its plugs, some of which are available in the AUR, but close to none work as intended for the moment. Instead, most pantheon settings can be altered via dconf, they are located in the org.pantheon key. Use dconf-editor for easy editing.